Today I’m interviewing someone for the first time ever, and thankfully it’s someone I knew for quite a while now. Meet Charles Floate a 17yrs old (oops! he’s just turned 18 this April) super SEO from the UK. Charles is by far the most talented SEO of his age with a wide skill-set.
He’s already achieved quite a lot for his age, earning six-figures before he even turned 18. Now that he’s officially an adult, he’ll surely be able to grow his internet marketing company Godlike Marketing, his ‘Grey Hat’ SEO Blog God of SEO and his personal reputation as an extremely talented and successful, but often controversial, SEO.
So, without further ado, let’s go on to asking Charles a few questions, about how he got started as an SEO, how he got so successful at such a young age, and what he plans to do next.
Q. Hello Charles. It’s been great knowing you for quite a while now. First of all, tell me how it feels to become an adult? 😀
It feels a bit odd, I can legally drink and buy a house and all that stuffs! Which is nice, but also is a massive responsibility at the same time. Which slightly scares me, I actually have to be a “grown up” now, can’t be flame waring people on Twitter anymore! Darn…
Q. How did you get started in SEO?
My mum launched a business in which she had an online side in retail. The company who developed the site wanted £3,500/month (around $5,000) for a medium sized business. As she’d only JUST launched the site… She didn’t really want to spend that kind of money on it, as well as the AdWords spend. So she asked me (as she knew “I was good with computers”) to have a look into what SEO was and see if I could do anything for her.
I met my mentor a couple months later and started looking more and more into the SEO world.
Q. Why SEO out of so many things, what was it about SEO that attracted you the most?
I’ve always wanted to work from home with no limitations to what I can do all day, a lot of SEOs work the standard 9-5 for an agency, but I really like the freedom of being able to do what I want all day and going out for a 2-3 hour long lunch or visiting family and going on holiday (a lot! Hehe)
Q. When did you decide you were gonna bid on SEO as a career option?
I was at College for a few months (around 3) and just found the lessons so boring, especially when I was getting “taught” how to design a website in PowerPoint #Facepalm
So I looked for jobs on GumTree (the Craigslist of the UK) and found one local enough that I could go everyday, went to my first interview and got the job and started the next day!
Q. Were you not concerned about the potential risk of failure?
I was, yes… I had my mum pestering me for a while about quitting college, but one day at 6am when she was still half asleep, I stomped into her bedroom and told her I was quitting and going to work at this company fulltime – Never looked back since.
Q. Let me put it simply, how did you scale everything up and become this effin’ famous in the SEO community today?
Haha, I wouldn’t say I was “famous” – I did have a reader of my blog call me Infamous when I met up with him the other day though.
I invested a lot of time into guest posting over the first few months, mainly for Matthew Woodward. As well as putting together some relatively big guides on very specific things like E-Commerce or Music or YouTube, guides that’d attract a certain group of people when each one was released. This helped me grow a really diverse community and helped me market to places perhaps outside of the general SEO and Internet Marketing community, growing my target audience by a boat load!
Q. You are often heard praising content marketing. Do you believe it can effectively replace link ‘building’ by ‘earning’ links instead, while making a site or blog grow?
It’s great… But it’s the same as “viral marketing” (which I personally think is a better phrase for it) – Half the time, the awesome content you create isn’t going to be seen by anyone, which means… No links!
I like to think that in 10 years’ time there’ll still be some black hat trickery out there to bolster the newbies of the future generations.
Q. If you could use only 5 SEO tools (except Google’s own Analytics, WMT etc.), which ones would you stick to?
This is actually pretty easy!
- SAPE – Just because it’s an awesome, kick-ass network with a ton of sites added daily.
- ScrapeBox – Because of it’s gigantic amount of tools, it really is the Pen Knife of SEO.
- Ahrefs – Just because I am addicted to stalking competitor’s link profiles.
- SEMRush – Again, seeing what competitor’s are ranking for, and being able to live monitor Ads as well is a HUGE advantage.
- Excel – Maybe not so much an “SEO Tool” by nature, but it saves me a lot of time and has some awesome uses.
Q. How do you plan to grow your internet marketing agency, Godlike Marketing?
We’ve got quite a few clients already and are doing alright so far! – I’m aiming to do some more traditional marketing techniques over the next few months and looking at some media buys as well.
Q. How did it feel, at the age of 17, to be the CEO of a company generating revenues in six-figures?
It was really cool, I was very lucky to be able to grow it so fast and a big shoutout to Matthew Woodward for letting me do my gigantic E-Commerce post which referred a lot of clients our way and for giving us some bonus free advertising as well!
I’m just looking forward to my next goal of getting it upto a million a year before 21!
Q. What is your plan in the long term – do you want to outsource agency work and focus on your personal projects like the AgentsofLeague blog or the Adsense Empire case study? Or do you want to remain on top of client work that your agency undertakes?
I actually have almost completely stopped doing client work myself now… We’re sitting on a 3 man team in London that is doing all of the client work now – I still handle 2 clients myself though. I’m looking to grow out the team and try and get as many new clients over the next few months as possible.
The retire at 25 dream isn’t looking too impossible now! ^.^
I am looking forward to growing more of my personal projects though, they still generate quite a bit of income between them all and it’s a nice little side bonus to spend on some clothes or a holiday!
Q. Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?
I’m hoping to of settled down a bit, have my own nice place in a different country and have grown Godlike to be a pretty good size!
I’m also thinking about enrolling in a computer sciences degree at some point in the future and learning more about hardcoding… I’m ok with Python and HTML/CSS now but it’s nothing as compared to stuff I’d like to be able to do.
Q. Lastly, do you think SEO, or internet marketing in general is a worthwhile alternative to 9-to-5 jobs as a career option? In a similar note, is it worth spending a couple of years getting a degree (in internet marketing and the likes) from a university or do you believe actual skills are all that matter?
It’s definitely an alternative.. Though don’t go and quit your job tomorrow kinda thing, work on your skills in your spare time and run some projects, you probably aren’t going to be super successful until a year or so in as there’s a massive amount of basic information you’ll need to learn before you’re even ready to dedicate huge amounts of hours to projects.
For IM, I think it’s a complete waste of time and money to enrol in any traditional education platform for it. Go on Reddit or Inbound or InsideIM and you’ll be able to find a LOAD more information within a couple clicks than most people will be able to show you in a year. I would recommend paying for some private tuition/consulting with someone who’s good in a specific set of skills you’d like to get into though.
So, that’s all! Thanks a lot Charles for your valuable time.
I hope you enjoyed the read. Feel free to drop a comment below if you have anything to tell or know about Charles and his way to success. 
